


Frozen

by Duck_Life



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Coming Out, Friendship, Frozen Yogurt, Gen, Kitty is supes closeted, Set right after Uncanny 600
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 03:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15500979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: Bobby confesses something to Kitty.





	Frozen

Someone knocks on Kitty’s office door, and that surprises her. The kids (and Illyana, and Jubilee, and pretty much everyone) usually barge on in without knocking. “Come in,” she says, shuffling papers around. She’s been trying to put some of the newer kids into groups but all of their names and mutations and hometowns are starting to swirl together in her head. 

Bobby pokes his head into her office. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she says. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know,” Bobby says evasively. He walks in, letting the door swing only halfway shut. “Can I sit down?”

Kitty gives him a weird look. “You may,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’m not  _ your _ principal, Bobby.”

“I know, I know,” he says, sliding into the chair across from her. It’s obvious he’s nervous about something. She doesn’t need to see the frost creeping up the arms of his chair to figure that out. “How’s mini-me doing?”

“Uh, last time I saw the kids, they were doing alright,” Kitty says, thinking back to her last facetime with Warren. “What about you? Are  _ you _ doing alright?” She knows that hearing about his younger self coming out as gay shook him up. But she also knows how these alternate universe, time-travel things work. There are universes where Logan is gay and dating Hercules, where Piotr is gay, hell, there’s probably a universe where  _ she’s _ gay and married to Rachel. Doesn’t mean anything to  _ this _ universe, though. Kitty’s sure of that. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Bobby says, not sounding fine. He drums his fingers on her desk. “Kitty…” He’s about to say something, she can hear him take the breath, but then she meets his eyes and sees him change his mind. “Do… do you wanna go get some frozen yogurt?”

She takes one more look at her paperwork and huffs a sigh. “Yeah, yeah I do,” she says, shoving her papers in a folder and tucking it into her desk. “I’m going stir-crazy in here.” She gets up and follows him to the garage.

* * *

 

Bobby drives, taking them some roundabout way to a frozen yogurt shop on the other side of town. It’s one of those places that weighs the froyo and charges it by the ounce. Kitty gets chocolate yogurt with chocolate sprinkles, chocolate cookie crumbles, chocolate chips and chocolate fudge drizzle, because she may be a principal but she can still have fun. 

Bobby gets about two spoonfuls of yogurt and then loads up on gummy worms and gummy bears. 

“So,” Kitty says once they sit down, “how, um, how’s life? Besides the X-Men stuff, how are  _ you _ ?” When did it become so hard to talk to her friends? She’s gotten so wrapped up in the school and the students and what this week’s threat to mutantkind is, she can’t even remember how small talk works.

Bobby shrugs. Despite getting out of Kitty’s stuffy office, he looks just as uncomfortable. “Oh, you know,” he says again, waving a hand. “Uh, I did Jessica Drew’s taxes. That was kind of interesting. She’s got a dependent now, so. Yeah.” 

“Bobby, why did you want to talk to me?” she says, because she’s been waiting for him to get to his point for almost an hour now. 

“Um,” Bobby says, and then he winces. “Agh, brainfreeze.”

“You can’t get brainfreezes.”

“Well… yeah,” he sighs, setting his spoon down. “Yeah, so, I wanted to tell you something but then when I got to your office I… I got scared.”

She frowns. “Bobby, you can talk to me about anything,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” he sighs. “Or… nothing. Maybe nothing’s wrong, for the first time since I… for the first time ever. Jeez. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying.” She opens her mouth to speak but he cuts her off. “Do you remember Scott and Jean’s wedding?”

_ What? _ “Yeah…” Kitty says, no clue where this is going. “Why?”

“You and I were talking at one point, during the reception,” Bobby remembers. “And you said, ‘Y’think we’ll ever get married?’”

Kitty laughs. “And you said, ‘Are you proposing to me, Pryde?’”

“Yeah, yeah, but I knew what you meant,” Bobby goes on. “Like, would you ever get married? Would I ever get married? Do X-Men that aren’t Scott and Jean get that kind of relationship? And I remember thinking… that I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t picture myself marrying anyone. Well…” He looks too pale, even for him. Kitty looks down and realizes his hands are shaking. “I couldn’t picture myself marrying any girls.” 

_ Oh _ . “Bobby…”

“Sorry, I… this is stupid,” he mumbles, dropping his plastic spoon. His hands won’t stop trembling. “Bobby and Jean came and talked to me awhile ago.” 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bobby says, giving her a pointed look. “Yeah, and you… you should really talk to young Jean about going into people’s heads, outing them, because it’s  _ not _ cool and it… it… and if she hadn’t done that and if Hank hadn’t brought them all here then…”

“I… I can talk to her,” Kitty says, trying to figure out the right thing to say. “I mean, I don’t know for sure that it’s my place, as a straight woman.” For whatever reason, she feels like she needs to assert that fact right now. She doesn’t know why. “I do know for a fact that after the whole ordeal, Benjamin Deeds— you know him? He looks… well he sort of looks like whoever he wants to—  he had a kind of serious talk with her on Bobby’s behalf. I don’t know what they talked about exactly but… I mean… but, Bobby, this isn’t about Jean. And it isn’t about you.” She falters. “I mean, it  _ is _ about you. You-you, not him-you. Not younger Bobby.” 

He still seems fixated on Jean. “They’re different than we were,” he says. “They’re different than me and Jean and Hank and Scott and Third… Know how I know? Because my Jean wouldn’t have told everybody like that.  _ My Jean _ know the whole damn time and she never… she never…” 

“Bobby,” Kitty says. She comes around the table. “Can I hug you?” He nods and she ropes her arms around him, squeezes him tight. She can feel him shaking still. “It’s okay. It’s really, really okay.” 

“I’m gay,” he says, and he kind of coughs it out and it’s kind of a sigh, not some big declaration. He’s not there. “I tried really hard not to be, Kitty, but…”

“It’s okay,” she says, still hugging him. “I’m really glad you told me.”

“We were going out…” he mumbles.

“Yeah, but you’re my friend before you’re my ex,” she points out. “And, since you’re my friend, I’d never want you to be ashamed about any part of yourself. Not the mutant thing, not the half-Jewish half-Catholic thing, and not this.” 

“You’re the first real person I told,” Bobby says, starting to calm down. He’s gay and the world didn’t end. He said it out loud and the world didn’t end. “I never really had to  _ tell _ either Jean. And I guess I told younger me, but he doesn’t count.” 

“I… I’m really glad you trusted me like this,” she says, the words feeling clunky even as she says them. She doesn’t know how to convey to him how much this means to her, that instead of going to Hank or Ororo or Kurt, he’d go to her. “And, yikes, I don’t think anyone else in the world can say they had a more complicated coming out, what with the time travel. This must be frickin’ hellish.” 

Bobby laughs drily. “You know why I think younger me is so much more well-adjusted than I am?” he says. Kitty notices his shaking has gone down. “Because all I had was Charles Xavier. Younger me has it way better, he has you teaching him.” 

  
  



End file.
